Les Enfants Terrible

THE LIBERAL PRACTICE OF MALICIOUSLY "OUTING" GAY Republicans is alive and well in the State of Washington. The latest victim is Spokane Mayor Jim West, who is being taken down by The Spokesman-Review for being gay and Republican, right before the city is to consider a "domestic partners" ordinance.

The charges leveled at West are for the most part unsubstantiated, as with these charges:

The Spokesman-Review story included detailed accounts and photographs of two men who allege West molested them when they were in the Boy Scouts.

The two men in question are felons whose credibility is so questionable that local police have no plans to investigate the charges. A careful perusal of the remaining charges reveals the following to be the only provable charge.

...he offered gifts, favors and a City Hall internship during Internet chats with a man he believed was 18.

Offering an internship in exchange for sex is certainly ethically questionable, but at this point only rises to the level of "schtick." There is no evidence that West has actually given young males jobs in exchange for sex. Frankly, he sounds like any guy on the make. But here's the kicker:

The online pen pal was actually a forensic computer expert working for the newspaper.

It is very difficult not to get the impression that the Post-Intelligencer set West up with the chat room bait and then unleashed a plethora of unsubstantiated charges in order to give the story some teeth. Let's face it, a gay man, or any man for that matter, cruising chat rooms for a companion is hardly news. But make that a Republican homosexual, and throw in some highly suspect charges of molestation, and now you've got a veritable lynch mob.

Of course the real crime, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is not his homosexuality, but his politics in relation to his sexual orientation. West, according to the paper...

...championed an anti-gay agenda during his tenure as one of the most powerful Republicans in the Legislature...

..."It's a pretty egregious case of hypocrisy," Washington State University political scientist Lance LeLoup told The Associated Press.

"Anti-gay" in this case is code used by the newspaper for not pushing a "pro-gay" agenda. Post-Intelligencer colunnist Joel Connelly reports:

West championed criminal background checks for jobs involving children, warning that abusers "often try to gain a position of trust and authority."

West proposed making it a misdemeanor for unmarried teenagers 18 or younger to have sexual contact.

He co-sponsored a bill to bar gay men and lesbians from working in schools, day care centers and some agencies: It provided for screening prospective employees on their sexual orientation.

When John Kerry notes that he is personally anti-abortion but won't allow that to shade his political judgement, he is called a great man. When West does not allow his sexual preference to shade his judgement, he is called a hypocrit. This story could have just as easily read "West refuses to let personal life affect public judgement."

As Brian Maloney at Radio Equalizer reports, the story is rapidly becoming about the ethics of The Spokesman-Review. The Seattle Times reports this:

The use by The Spokesman-Review of a computer expert posing as an 18-year-old man in a gay chat room raises ethical questions about whether or under what circumstances news organizations should use such techniques.

Maloney adds this:

If West was a liberal Democrat, the news media wouldn't dream of luring him into a chat room with with a hired 18-year-old male, all to supposedly suggest he molested boys as a scout leader in the 1970s.

Of course they wouldn't. But the fact that West is a Republican makes this especially precious, as noted by liberal blogger Blatherwatch:

It’s sad, sure, but I gotta be honest. It’s delicious watching the downfall of this man who held himself so high above the rest of us.

This situation has yet to work itself out, but one gets the impression that West is being persecuted by a leftist media for being gay and not adhering to the party line. As Les Enfants Terrible's Washington correspondent Armandt put it:

...if West were Democrat, they story line would be how the Religious Right is simply trying to throw-down another gay man trying to earn his keep... and how we're trying to keep him out of politics.

Armandt also reports that there is a backlash from liberal gays being demonstrated on a local talk show hosted by Brian Suits. He...

...has strong-gay-liberal callers saying this looks like a lynching.

It looks like the left has learned the "Jeff Gannon" lesson well. Any string of flimsy charges can be nicely tied together by pointing a finger and charging "fag Republican" in the hopes that a conservative politician can be discredited using his personal life.

This is just the latest in a pattern that suggests the only homosexuals that fall under the leftist umbrella of diversity and tolerance are liberal ones. That, of course, begs the question: Just who are the real hypocrits here anyway?

This story is developing...